Blue Resurrection, page 8
Vane gave a sharp nod to the guards. One swung the butt of his rifle. The blow connected with the back of De Las’s neck.
The sound wasn’t soft. It wasn’t hollow. It was the sound of hitting stone—dull, crushing, sickening. The General didn’t fall. He absorbed the blow—his head snapped forward, then slowly returned to its original position. The blue veins around the impact site glowed brighter. The tissue visibly knitted back together in seconds.
He smiled. His teeth were grayish.
“Can’t... kill... what’s already... dead, Admiral.”
Vane made a hand gesture. The guards grabbed the chains and yanked back sharply. De Las was dragged back toward the airlock’s darkness, but his gaze remained fixed on Anika until the last moment. In those eyes, there was no plea for help. There was pity.
The door hissed shut, severing the sounds, the light, and the cold. Sergeant Milo, standing to Anika’s left, was breathing rapidly, his nails digging into his palms.
Vane straightened his uniform cuffs, unperturbed, as if performing a routine administrative task rather than confronting a monster. He turned to the holo-table and tapped the panel.
“General De Las is a prototype.” Vane spoke the words with cold objectivity, like an engineer describing an outdated version of software. “First generation. The psyche stabilizers have been vastly improved in Series 7. What you saw is raw power without a control module. You will be perfected.”
Anika tasted bitterness in her mouth. He’s lying. She felt it with every fiber of her being. De Las wasn’t defective. He was the end result.
“You have twelve hours.” Vane didn’t look up from the console. His tone brooked no argument. “Tomorrow at 06:00, the procedure begins.”
“And if we refuse?” Anika’s voice sounded harder than she felt.
Vane didn’t turn. He input a command. The light in the room shifted from sterile white to an uneasy red.
A new hologram materialized above the table. It wasn’t a schematic. It was a live feed. The image flickered, relayed from an orbital drone through layers of interference and smoke. The camera showed the surface of Colony Vega Prime. Or what was left of it. Cities were craters. Massive pillars of black smoke rose into the stratosphere. But more horrifying was the movement on the ground. Vast swarms breached the infantry’s defensive lines.
The audio crackled to life. First, there was noise. Then, screams. Millions of voices merging into a single death wail.
“This is the alternative, Lieutenant.” Vane pointed toward the slaughter.
“Sector 4 fell an hour ago. Command has no resources for evacuation. If you are not in the capsules tomorrow morning, you will be deployed as standard first-line infantry by noon.”
He turned to them, his face illuminated by the holographic flames.
“The choice is clear. Accept the Blue Code and become gods. Remain human—and you become fodder.”
Vane powered down the console, leaving them in semi-darkness.
“Twelve hours, Reyes. Don’t waste them on prayers.”
The Admiral’s footsteps echoed on the metal deck, receding toward the exit. Anika remained rooted in place, her gaze fixed on the black space where, moments before, the world had burned.
She looked at her own hands. Her skin looked so fragile. So easy to tear.
In her ears, De Las’s whisper still echoed.
The hunger.
Time was up. The trap had sprung.
CHAPTER 6
The pneumatics of the entrance airlock hissed. The interior of the living module in the Green Zone sector of Base "Silence" greeted them with the characteristic, stifling smell of human sweat absorbed into the walls and unwashed clothes. The smell was familiar, and precisely for that reason – comforting. The module was designed for sleeping, not living. Five bunks bolted to the floor. Five metal lockers. One table bearing the marks of countless coffee mugs. There was no room for secrets here. Nor was there room for hope.
Anika entered last, pulling the airtight door shut behind her. The magnetic locks clacked shut – their fetters severing them from the corridor, from Vane, from the memory of the colony’s ashes. But not from the ultimatum. It had already possessed them, an invisible parasite, constricting their shoulders and chests.
No one spoke. The tension thickened between them – cold, dense, ready to crack open and swallow them whole. Milo sagged onto the bottom bunk, his gaze fixed somewhere beyond the grated floor. His arms hung limp, his fingers almost brushing the metal plates.
Anika surveyed her people. An hour ago—maybe less—they had been a platoon. A unit. An organism with a common purpose. Now they were five biological entities awaiting sentencing.
They are coming apart right before my eyes.
She didn’t need a scanner to see the discipline fracturing at the seams. She saw it in the too-tightly clenched jaw of Seila. In the trembling fingers of Elliot on his tablet. In the painfully straight spine of Nara, as if her body was preparing for a fight with an invisible enemy.
Seila took the first step. Or rather—the first spasm. She peeled herself from the wall and paced the module. Three steps forward, a sharp turn, three steps back. Her boots clanged against the grated floor—an aggressive staccato rhythm that made their teeth click.
"This is insanity."
Her voice grated, stretched to the point of snapping. She stopped for a moment, turning to the others.
"This is... medical perversion. Do you understand what they're offering us?"
Anika opened her mouth. The regulations offered a protocol for almost everything—for complaints, for questioning orders, even for panic under fire. But there was no procedure for this. The words remained stuck somewhere in her throat, unfinished.
Seila didn't stop moving. Her feet kept stomping.
"They want to open us up like tin cans and pour that filth into our veins."
She kicked the empty chair by the table. The metal rattled hideously, the sound rebounding off the walls.
"Did you see De Las's eyes? I saw them. Hell, I saw them... I watched him the entire meeting. Did you see what's left of him, damn it?"
No one answered.
"Nothing."
Seila threw up her hands.
"He's a willless puppet, stuffed with chemicals. A walking injection. And they want to do the same to us."
"It's not chemicals."
The voice came from the corner—quiet, hollow, terrifyingly methodical.
Elliot had hunched on the top bunk like a spider, his spine forming an arc. His face was lit in a ghostly blue by his tablet screen. His fingers flew over lines of code and encrypted files.
"It's not chemicals."
He repeated without looking up. The usual sarcastic note was gone from his voice. Now it sounded flat, dry, terrifyingly methodical.
"It's... a viral vector therapy. Banned in twelve systems for reasons that are very well documented."
Seila stopped mid-stride. She turned sharply towards him, her shoulders taut.
"What are you babbling about, Elliot? Stop reading that crap."
"It's not crap."
He swallowed.
"It's statistics. The access is encrypted, but 'Silence's servers are old. The security system is two decades out of date. I breached the Medical Corps archive."
His fingers stopped for a second, then continued their movement.
"Project 'Blue Resurrection'. Phase One. Classification: absolute."
He lifted the tablet, as if the screen shielded him from the others. The blue light cast jagged shadows across his jaw.
"Thirty percent mortality upon first injection."
His voice cracked on the last word.
"Multiple organ failure. The heart stops because the blood thickens around it. Kidneys suffocate. The liver dissolves."
"Elliot..."
Anika began, but he didn't stop.
"Another forty percent... cognitive collapse. Irreversible degeneration of brain tissue. The brain can't process the new sensory data. Neural pathways disintegrate like an overloaded grid."
He raised his head. His eyes were wide, almost black.
"They don't die, Seila. They claw out their own eyes while screaming. One of the videos shows a subject who chewed off his own tongue to the root because he couldn't stand the taste of his own spit."
Seila went pale. Pallor washed over her face. Her fury collided head-on with fear and lost momentum.
"You're lying."
Her words escaped quietly, almost pleadingly.
"They wouldn't... We're an elite unit. The Federation wouldn't... We're an asset. A valuable asset."
"We're lab rats."
Elliot laughed—a short, brittle sound with nothing to do with mirth.
"Lab rats with military training. Better than civilians because we already know how to kill. See here."
He twisted the tablet towards her.
"Zero success rate without lasting psychological deviation. Zero. Zero point zero recurring. This isn't therapy. It's a protracted death sentence."
Anika felt her pulse quicken, pounding against her temples. Elliot's panic was contagious, spreading through the air between them. She had to stop him, say something, impose control before the entire platoon collapsed into chaos.
Shhhhht.
The sound sliced through the tension.
Shhhhht.
Rhythmic. Slow. Deadly calm.
All eyes shifted to Nara. She sat on the edge of her bunk, her spine straight as a bowstring, feet planted firmly on the floor. In her left hand she held her combat knife—twenty centimeters of matte-black steel, imperfectly forged, with a rough, pitted grip. In her right—a whetstone worn smooth over the years.
Shhhhht.
She drew the stone along the blade with almost ritualistic care. She didn't look at Elliot, nor at Seila. Her gaze was focused entirely on the cutting edge.
Shhhhht.
The metal screamed under the stone—a high, angry keen that pierced their teeth like a sharp nail.
Shhhhht.
The sound became a physical force. It seeped under their skin, scraped their nerves from the inside, tore at their concentration. Elliot flinched on the bunk, his hands tightening on the tablet. Seila clenched her jaw, but the muscle there trembled with the effort not to scream.
Shhhhht.
The rhythm was endless. It didn't stop.
Nara sharpened the knife relentlessly, seeking a perfection that seemed unattainable.
"Enough babbling, Elliot."
Nara's voice sounded low, monotone, devoid of inflection. The contrast to the others' hysteria was chilling.
Shhhhht.
"The statistics are for civilians. We are not civilians."
Shhhhht.
"Didn't you hear what I said?"
Elliot nearly shrieked. The tablet trembled in his hands.
"Guaranteed madness! They'll turn us into monsters!"
Shhhhht.
Nara stopped the motion of her hand. She raised the knife and examined it in the light. The blade didn't gleam; it absorbed the light, creating a black abyss in the spectrum.
"Out there..."
She nodded towards the airlock door.
"There are things that eat people. We saw them on the monitors during the briefing. We saw what they did to the colony. We saw the pieces."
She resumed the motion, slower now, almost ritualistic.
Shhhhht.
"If we remain human, we're dead. Feedstock for the grinder. Chunks of meat in a can."
Nara lifted her eyes. Her irises were cold, dark, unyielding.
"I'd rather be the monster that kills, than the human that dies screaming in the dark. If the price is my sanity... they can have it. At least my hands will remember how to slit throats. Muscle memory doesn't require consciousness."
Her words hung in the air—final, unshakable.
Seila watched her with a mixture of disgust and horror. Her mouth opened, then closed. Elliot curled up tighter on the bunk, gripped by the terror that Nara's knife was already slitting his throat.
Anika felt her platoon disintegrating before her eyes. Not into pieces—more terrifyingly. Into fractions. Into separate atoms repelling each other. One chose panic. Another—rage. The third—dehumanization. None heard the other.
She stepped into the center of the room, forcing her legs to move though every cell in her body screamed to run. She had to be the anchor. She had to be the commander, even if she herself didn't believe in her own orders.
"Enough!"
Her voice—a trained weapon, capable of cutting through the chaos of battle—rebounded off the metal walls and echoed tripled upon the others.
"Elliot, put the tablet away. Seila, sit down. Nara, put the knife away."
No one moved a muscle.
For one painfully brief but sufficient fraction of a second, Anika caught hesitation in their eyes. Not obedience. Hesitation. Which was worse than open mutiny, because it meant her authority was no longer absolute.
"We are a platoon."
She poured all her command authority into the words, made her voice sound steady.
"We are not lab rats. We are not monsters. We are Federation soldiers. We have a duty. We signed a contract that..."
Her words lost meaning in her mouth even as she spoke them. They tasted like a lie. Contract. As if the word still meant something when talking about tearing DNA at the seams. Duty. As if you could order a man to become a monster and he would obey with discipline.
Empty formulas. Consumable garbage.
Her throat tightened. She saw her own words shatter against their silence like against a solid wall.
"The contract doesn't cover this."
Seila interrupted, quietly. And that was more frightening than any shout.
"Anika, the contract covers combat operations. It covers wounds. It even covers death in the line of duty. It doesn't cover..."
She gestured vaguely.
"This. They don't want our loyalty. They want our DNA."
"Our duty is to protect the colonies."
Anika turned to Seila, seeking eye contact. But she met only a wall of anger and fear.
"If that requires... adaptation. We will adapt."
The word rang hollow in the tight space. Adaptation. As if they were talking about new software, not profound biological transformation. Anika felt the lie burning inside her. She herself didn't believe what she was saying. How could she expect the others to accept it?
The regulations don't speak of this. The regulations don't cover mutants. They cover humans.
"We will get through this together."
Anika continued, though she could feel her argument disintegrating before she finished the sentence.
"Like we have so far. As a team. No one will lose their mind because I will be there..."
"To do what?"
Seila stepped towards her, violating personal space. Her breath was hot, sour with fear.
"To hold my hand while my brain dissolves? To whisper comforts while I claw out my eyes?"
She leaned even closer, her eyes—two holes burned out by fury.
"The regulations say nothing about becoming... something else. Something inhuman. And in that, you won't be our commander, Anika. You'll just be another body on the slab."
"I bear responsibility for you."
Anika forced the words through her teeth, feeling her control slipping, elusive.
"You can't command biology!"
Elliot looked up from the tablet, his eyes manically wide.
"You can't command your cells not to mutate! You can't command your neural pathways not to disintegrate!"
"You will obey orders!"
Anika roared, losing control.
Her hand went to her holster—instinctive, born of helplessness, not threat. She didn't touch it. Only indicated its direction. But it was enough.
Nara stopped sharpening the knife. Her fingers tightened around the grip, shifting it to a combat-ready position—a change unnoticeable to an untrained eye, but Anika caught it. Seila drew back, assuming a stance—feet firmly planted, shoulders back. Even Milo, who had remained motionless on the bunk until now, lifted his head.
The tension in the room went white-hot, to the point of explosion.
Trust evaporated in a second, replaced by the primal instinct for survival. Anika realized with horror—cold, crystalline horror—that she might have just turned her people into enemies. Not mutineers. Into enemies.
Have I lost them?
Before anyone could make the fatal move, before weapons could be drawn or she could be attacked, the world exploded in red.
WOOOP. WOOOP. WOOOP.
The emergency siren burst forth so unexpectedly and with such force it made their teeth chatter. The lights in the module died for a second—absolute darkness—then came on as spinning red beacons. Their faces became bloody masks, shadows leaped across the walls like frenzied things.
WOOOP.
The mechanical wail drowned the argument, drowned the reasoning, drowned everything—the anger, the fear, the self-preservation instinct. Only the sound remained—harsh, impersonal, absolute.
WOOOP.
The door of the living module clacked. The hermetic seals released with a hiss of equalizing pressure. The metal plates slid aside, revealing the corridor beyond—flooded in the same red glare, flashing with intermittent pulses, like the irregular heartbeat of a dying station.
No one moved. Frozen in their positions—Nara with the knife, Seila in her stance, Elliot curled on the bunk, Anika with her hand over the holster—they stared at the open passageway.
The siren continued to wail.
* * *
The corridor was constricting. The steel-clad walls seemed to narrow menacingly toward them, rhythmically stained crimson by the rotating red warning lights. The siren’s wail didn't just shatter the silence—it injected adrenaline straight into their veins, syncing with the frantic pounding of their hearts.
Anika led the way. Her boots clanged against the grating. Her breath scraped in her throat, raw and ragged. Behind her, the stomping of the squad sounded chaotic. There was no time for formation. No time for protocol. Those philosophical debates from minutes ago, that hollow rhetoric about "humanity" in the hab-module—all of it had vanished, melted away by the heat of the looming catastrophe.
